It was less than three short days ago that we wrote about what is poised to be an imminent surge in corn prices. To wit, we said: "If revised Chinese import estimates by the US Grain Council are even
remotely correct, look for corn prices of $6.80 a bushel at last check
to jump by at least 15% in a very short amount of time. As the FT reports, "Corn prices – and with them, the price of meat – are set to explode if the latest import estimates from China are correct. The US Grain Council, the industry body, said late on Thursday
that it has received information pointing to Chinese imports as high as
9m tonnes in 2011-12, up from 1.3m in 2010-11." Why is this a
concern? Because "the US Department of Agriculture, which compiles
benchmark estimates of supply, demand and stocks, forecast Chinese imports at just 1m tonnes in 2011-12." In other words, the whole forecast supply-demand equilibrium is about to be torn to shreds." And with the market being perfectly efficient, and not dominated by dumb robotic HFT trading at all, it has taken the "market makers-cum-liquidity providers-cum-no volume meltup facilitators" just over 48 hours to understand what this means. And what it means practically, is another limit up open in the grain.

And after Rough Rice had a nice profit taking two day session, the world's most consumed staple is once again back on the verge of $16 and breaking out to the $20-24 level. We wonder how Egyptian protestors will feel when they realize that in the two weeks since the Egyptian revolution started in earnest, most foodstuffs have increased by another 15%+.

That 52% is what we're going to be eating to survive, since big agra will fold when the oil stops being refined. That's the end of corn for a while.But we might not need them all for food, I remember reading that the Aztecs got by eating only about 11% of their population. We could possibly take the surplus and harness them to plows and cultivators, to grow non hybrid corn. Kick start the corn market all over again.

After two years of growing corn, I vowed never to plant the weed in my garden again. It's a heavy feeder, pests love it, and it provides less nutrition per square foot than many other veggies. I'll have to try planting sack of flour this spring. Thanks for the idea.

No, it's just weaponization of one of our greatest resources. Just think, every sqeal of the tires in your muscle car is like you're burning a destitute for fuel!

This is what people deserve, we try to be nice, bring democracy, technology and all the good shit to them and they want to bitch about imperialism, whine about how we "tell them how to run their country". Fine. Now we'll play hard ball. We've fattened up your populations for 40 or so years, got you beyond your means of self support. Now we'll take the bad pill this morning and guess what? You work for us now, or you don't eat.

There's actually a phrase in Chinese which is something like "swapping babies time" - it comes from when there was a famine caused by the Mongol invasions and people would meet in the town square to exchange their dead children for the children of other families, as you didn't want to eat your own....

I wonder if eating tree leaves will become a delicacy......everything associated with corn cost too much now thanks to Uncle Ben, raising use of ethanol in gasoline, meat products that are grain fed raised, cereal, bread, etc.....

Everbody complained to him about his sparc comments without realizing that sparc still owned huge and I mean huge market share in the enterprise sector. I just ran across a topic of discussion about developement of symmetric multiprocessing and what held it back the most was people sticking to thier sparcs and AIX.

Every single physicist astrophysicists and most engineers can program fortran. It's not a fucking fad. It's formula translater. Everybody who uses math heavily and extensivly uses it. Now get over that fact.

Oh she is a floozy I will give you that. I bet she would love to hook up with COBOL. He is sitting on top of billions of lines of installed code but he is busy with his life partner APL. Don't you question their love!

The problem is programming languages do not die. They go into a long tail where they are maintained in a undead like state due to the shortsightedness of management.

Just like the evergreen, the COBOL programming language has remained vibrant and full of life year after year. Today, COBOL is running a large number of the world's business data applications, and it's likely to remain a viable language in the years ahead.

Still going strong, can't keep an old man down! If you listen closely when you open the amazon page you can almost hear the Duck Dodgers theme.

Lets take the peg war to the chinese and teach them a lesson they will never forget. Everyone go buy 200 lbs of corn and throw it out in the woods. I would rather the deer and turkey get it than the chinese.

Corn production is about to be nationalized - watch for it. At $6.80 for corn, and even with the subsidy dooubled, the selling price of ethanol would have to be @ $3.10/gallon for a standard 52MM GPY ethanol plant to break even.

If there was some way to post it I have a 2010 Purdue University spreadsheet for that 52MM GPY plant that makes the dynamics perfectly clear.

1/3 of corn produced in the US is used to make ethanol. The entire ethanol subsidy is a big scam. Drop subsidies for farmers, open the market for Brasilian ethanol and you will see the corn price plummet.

No-take the 1/3 and stop ethanol production and sell/trade corn for oil on a 10 year contract, THEN you pull the subsidy from the farmers but Archer-Daniels etc get the difference between the subsidized corn price and the oil contract; so the little guy gets to keep getting screwed.

Chinese are scared as shit what with memories of the cultural revolution and now the mother of all ghost city real estate bubble. Balls to the wall with those chinese peggers. They will destroy themselves unless they de peg.

The primary thing driving up commodity prices worldwide are speculators armed with cheap money provided by central bankers and super fast computers. This is causing a havoc in the lives of rest of the population and pushing them towards poverty as they can no longer afford the basic necessities of life.

Regulators are either hand in glove with the banksters or are too slow to react and take ages to identify and take measures to solve the problems.

Total ban on speculation and the reinforcement of Glass Steagall Act is strictly required to bring relief to the man on the street.

So that is the storyline these corrupt incompetent third world governments are telling their people. If you are going to troll here.from china then you need to register as a foreign troll. It only takes about four weeks longer than domestic registration.

I'll believe dollar strength when I see it...$10 billion more fake dollars per day does not equal dollar strength. At the most you might see relative strength due to other currencies just being more worthless. Big deal.

Is it just me or is your analysis always wrong? That or you use the wrong metrics. USDX is WORTHLESS, since it is composed of 90% shitty devaluing currencies.

You trade your own advice? How are you doing? I'm up a little over 100% over my dollar cost average. About 250% over my initial (major) investment. Much more of this, and I might just retire to the gulch, or to a sunny beach somewhere.

I have, many times. ~95% physical silver, ~5% physical gold. Been all in for over a year now. Feels good man. So far I've only cashed in a tiny amount to take the family out to a nice dinner at $25, and a bit more to pay for some renovations to my mother's house.